It took 14 minutes to crack open a $545 Tumi, eight minutes to open a $218 Delsey, one minute to open a legendary $240 Samsonite, and twenty minutes to rip apart a cheap $99 American Tourister. So much for premium pricing. The only un-cracked winner: A $320 Victorinox which, coincidentally, is the one I bought a few months ago. [CBS]

Rather than wasting time, funds, and personnel in attempts to canvas entire jungles for an elephant census, researchers are simply setting up microphones. This bioacoustic monitoring technique is similar to what has been used in the past, on a smaller scale, to count birds, but in this case it's covering hundreds of square miles.

Researchers prepared by manually counting elephants and observing the sounds they make in order to create a system to interpret the sounds captured by the jungle microphones. It must've been a tedious bit of preparation, but if the alternative is "dung survey transects," I think those folks were more than happy to do it. [Elephant Listening Project via Wired]

Photo by exfordy

...it was dunked in mud, put inside a 300 degree oven, and soaked in beer. What finally did it in is being crushed by a three ton forklift, which is pretty above and beyond the duty of any phone we'd normally use.

As for the specs, it has 1500 hours of battery (standby or talk, we're not sure) and a 2-megapixel camera. And, most notably, it has an "extra loud" ringtone so you can hear it under elephants. [Telegraph via Slashdot]

Forbes's intrepid testers used the Toughbook to crush soda cans, used the screen as a dartboard, ran over it with a Volkswagen, gave it to a tiger as a chew toy, had an elephant stomp on it multiple times, and then the to top it all off, shot it with a .22 pistol. And the damage?

The only things that managed to do any lasting damage were the elephant and the gun; the elephant put two cracks in the case (purely cosmetic, however), and the gun did actually pierce the screen. But! The damn thing was still usable even after being shot! It never once ceased to boot and Forbes claims they were able to log into Windows even with a hole in the screen.

We ourselves have absolutely no use for the Toughbook-30, but we're tempted to get one in case we ever get that pet elephant we've always wanted. [Forbes]

The whole thing has a Dalí feeling mixed with a crisp, industrial punk feeling that is completely irresistible. At least for me, anyway. I'm buying it, whenever it comes out. [Baekdal and Andrew Chase via Book of Joe]

Pachyderm rescue group Save the Elephants started the scheme up after five elephants who refused to stop raiding crops had to be shot by the Kenya Wildlife Service. The project, still in its infancy, is expensive to implement and not without its troubles. But it's already saved the life of one regular crop fiend, a bull named Kimari who's been intercepted 15 times since he was first connected. [Daily Mail via Switched]